I'm the sort who doesn't like to talk about my previous jobs very much.
Maybe because I consider myself to have had a rather divergent career, and because one doesn't (commonly) have anything to do with the other, I mention them almost nearly not at all.
But once in a while little things pop up just to remind me just how far on this career journey I have come.
You might imagine it to be a person I met, a photograph, a newspaper article, a document or even a saved file from long ago.
But it was this.
A calculator.
A simple AURORA calculator bought from the Popular Bookstore when it was still in Orchard Road many years ago.
I hadn't realized it all this while, but I had actually been carrying her around throughout the course of my career since Day One when I began my first job in my first workplace earning my first pay cheque.
A long time ago I used to be a telemarketer.
As a telemarketer I had to calculate just how many shows I had to sell, and more importantly, just how many shows I had actually sold.
Let's just say the job involved a lot of calling from one landline to another.
And a lot of leaving of messages with the hope that the other party would call back.
The numbers punched into this calculator at that time were on the double-digit side.
They increased significantly in the next job thereafter.
Not that they escalated from double-digits to triple or quadruple at once, but cumulative double-digits do add up and that's what I punched in- regularly.
It's interesting how the numbers 30 and 50 don't look like a lot when seen on their own but put them in sets of 40 or 50 each and it's not so small anymore.
In the course of this job, there were other numbers that I had to put in, of course- quantitative data representing people or programs or percentages.
Which I did, annually.
I did it for about three years.
After that I moved on, and AURORA The Calculator moved along with me.
At this new place she was used no more for the sole purpose of reporting, but for things like costing, budgeting, numbers and the like.
Not easy, I tell you, when you're working for those who stinge resources and costs to the max and demand costs so low that you need an extensive network, and the intervention of the Spirit to drop solutions for problems others have created.
Still, it was fine.
Even if for a very short time.
That being said, no one could have foreseen just how heavily she would be used in a mere few years forward.
It was for a much more critical goal and a much more critical purpose this time.
It's one thing to report numbers (as they are) and bear little responsibility for it.
It's another thing, however, to report numbers (as they are) and know that the act of punching in those figures itself has a role in proving presumptions, and assumptions wrong, with consequences that have significance- in one way or another, otherwise.
We had consequences that we are thankful for.
AURORA isn't very heavily used these days.
But that's because she rides on a slightly different role.
Still, she's here- alongside with me on the journey- in different aspects- and I hope she'll have as many pleasant stories to tell- for a long, long time.